over time, and it was twenty years, the current crop of clones aged. Ive read that the cloning facilities were destroyed adn teh crop of stormtroopers one sees in epsIV-VI are your garden variety recruits that were trained and moved thru the system. Im sure there were some fasion of cloning going on, but not in the numbers required to sustain the Empire.

Armor evolves, but you can see the base line of the various types coming in thru epII and III...even a lot of color was added to denote levels adn/or rank.

over time, and it was twenty years, the current crop of clones aged. Ive read that the cloning facilities were destroyed adn teh crop of stormtroopers one sees in epsIV-VI are your garden variety recruits that were trained and moved thru the system. Im sure there were some fasion of cloning going on, but not in the numbers required to sustain the Empire.

Armor evolves, but you can see the base line of the various types coming in thru epII and III...even a lot of color was added to denote levels adn/or rank.

Sorry to jump into a closed thread here (clearly looks like he hit the new thread button instead of "reply" by accident!), but Lucas himself actually commented on this. See, in the official literature they've given us the absurdly low (minimalist) figure of 3.x million clones by the time of Episode III, which is completely inadequate for a galactic army, especially one that is fighting billions (or trillions!) of battle droids that can be produced in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost! The explanation for this EU number gaffe is that the troopers kill like 2,000 droids for every one of them that gets killed, but that's still completely absurd. Besides, we see dozens of casualties on the Trooper side in Episode III alone. We don't see each one of them killing 2,000 or even 200 droids each! And it seems positively absurd that with an army this small, they insist on crewing their battleships and fighters with clones as well, rather than just keeping them as an elite infantry force. 3 million troops gives you about 1.5 troopers on each inhabited planet in the Empire! (if we assume a million star systems with at least one habitable planet, based on the original Star Wars novelisation, IIRC). The EU people claim that the Troopers don't hold territory, that they just fly around as one big group to each battle. But that's a huge disadvantage since the CIS can easily leave a few thousand or million battle droids behind on each world THEY take over. And they're no longer reliant on the droid control ships like they were in TPM either, we're told.

Even if somehow all the cloning facilities were "destroyed" (according to the EU, after Episode II many more sources of clones were set up, beyond Kamino), that doesn't mean the technology would become lost, especially in such a short time. That's like saying they forgot how to build death stars because the first one was blown up! Anyway, yeah, the small numbers make the Republic out to be tactically stupid. It's like the only way the CIS could possibly lose is if they were controlled by a leader who didn't want them to win and ultimately betrayed them (which of course old Sideous did!).

Sidestepping all this nonesense in the EU (which he nevertheless had to approve somehow), Lucas says anyway that the clones of Jango are still in service in ANH. He says this specifically on the ANH DVD commentary and says he always intended this. He also comments on this same thing in the Kamino rain battle on the AOTC DVD commentary. In an interview he said that after awhile the Empire started using multiple clone templates, so that the clones are not all of Jango by the time of the classic trilogy, and that eventually they started mixing in conscripts of just normal guys into the armor. Official sources picked up his statements and now the army is "mostly clones" with also some non-clones mixed in. And the different heights and voices as demonstrated in the classic trilogy as then explained.

But if you take off the helmet off of some stormtroopers from the classic trilogy, according to Lucas, you'd see somebody who looks like Jango!